Top Girls by Caryl Churchill The purpose of this resear

The thematic structure of Top Girls is best understood as a presentation of ideas about the position of women in a man's social, intellectual, political, and economic world and the coping strategies that women employ in order to survive in that world. The playwright's dramatic strategy for presenting these ideas is create two different worlds, one entirely imaginary and the other grounded in mundane domestic realities. The play begins with a scene of pure fantasy, in which commentary about women's experience of the modern world is abstracted from first-person reportage to a contemporary woman of their experience of historical and imaginary worlds. Five women of different centuries, cultures, and milieus join Marlene, a modern woman (and the lead) who has just been named the chief executive of Top Girls' Employment Agency in London. The women from history are a famed Victorian traveler (Isabella Bird), a 13th-century Japanese courtesan (Lady Nijo), and a 9th-century woman who appears to have masqueraded as a man and been elected Pope (Pope Joan). There are also two fictional women, one a holy warrior/crusader figure

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ous on stage. Consider the following moment from I.i [virgule = interruption by next speaker at that point]: ISABELLA: My father taught me Latin although I was a girl. / But really I was MARLENE: They didn't have Latin at my school. ISABELLA: more suited to manual work. Cooking, washing, mending, riding horses. / Better than reading NIJO: Oh but I'm sure you're very clever. ISABELLA: books, eh Gret? A rough life in the open air. NIJO: I can't say I enjoyed my rough life. What I enjoyed most was being the Emperor's favorite / and wearing thin silk (I.i). The social inferences from this brief exchange imply a severe feminist critique, not simply of the historical suppression of women, which "everybody knows" is a given, but of the cultural suppression and constriction of women in the modern age, when the received wisdom is that the world has opened up for them. The Victorian woman was reared as both scholar and athlete; by the mid-20th century, a girls' school curriculum had dispensed with classics study. True enough, manual work for women in any age meant cooking and cleaning, but Isabella's experience of it appears to have been that she had a choice. Meanwhile, the courtesan Lady Nijo, in her harem prison (however luxurious
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Approximate Word count = 3592
Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page)